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Star Trek: Of Gods and Men released
2007-12-24 11:10:00
After spending time in development hell, episode 1 of Star Trek : Of Gods and Men has been released. Worth your time? Read on to find out.For a dead series (or at least one on life-support) there has been a lot of new Trek out lately, much of it featuring actors from the original series. I've blogged on Star Trek: New Voyages before now which is the pro-am series that sets the standard, and since the guys at New Voyages have been involved with this new mini-series hopes have been high that it would be just as good, if not better.A lot of professional actors are involved this time round as well as some guests from New Voyages and all of them give good performances, especially Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig reprising their roles of Uhura and Chekov. James Cawley as Commander Peter Kirk is excellent in his cameo appearance.The special effect are good, the plot is intriguing, the sound effects (provided by the incomparable Ralph Miller) are excellent and the acting is passable a...
More About: Released

Apples and Lyons
2007-12-24 10:16:00
So apparently Fake Steve Jobs aka Dan Lyons has been targetted by Apple's lawyers, presumably in a vain attempt to get him to shut the heck up.I know that this is the season of good will to all men, so presumably that should include our Mr Lyons but I've got to say that I'm really not surprised that Apple have had enough of him, only that it took this long. I was sick of the joke after the first couple of weeks.One thing that has amused me is his surprise that the EFF refused to represent him, allegedly because of some of the critical things he's said about them. Would they be Freetards or Linuxtards Dan?I've got to admit that I'm still not sure if this is just a publicity stunt by our Dan or if Apple genuinely wants to close his blog. According to Dan they've offered him half a million dollars for it (which he has so far turned down).Well, it's time to come clean. After my negative posts on the iPhone, Apple have been in touch with me too, and have made an offer based o...
More About: Apples

The Return of BBC iPlayer
2007-12-20 14:25:00
I blogged earlier on about the problems with BBC's iPlayer software. Apart from trying to sound cool by sticking an i at the start of the softwares name, the main problem with the player was that it was only available for Windows users thanks to their use of Microsofts own DRM solution.After a farcical display by the BBC in which they claimed that there were hardly any Linux users using their site, then that there were lots of Linux users, Auntie Beeb announced that there would be a flash based player coming out that Linux and Mac users would be able to use to view their programs. Hooray!Get used to this error - you'll be seeing a lot of itSo now we can all view the BBC's catch up service right? Well, not quite. Yes, you can watch it, but whether you'll actually get to the end of the program in a single viewing is anyones guess.I've tried this from a couple of locations, using Konqueror, Firefox, and finally IE on Windows from a different location and still get the same err...
More About: Return , The Return

The Pre-Christmas Lull
2007-12-19 10:46:00
Well, here we are less than a week before Christmas , and over a week since the release of the Batty Junior Christmas Demo.I hadn't been to sure if releasing the demo was a good idea, especially as the game is at a pretty early stage, but thankfully it seems to have been rather well received by the people who have played it.As I expected the missing power-ups has drawn some comments, but they are being added and will all be there for the next release.The next couple of powers have been added in (Thrusters and Multi-ball) and just need a little bit of a polish before I'll be happy with them. That only leaves the Extending bat and all the original power-ups will be there.Updating the code to allow for multiple balls on screen was something that I wasn't looking forward to. Really I should have done that much earlier on in the process (if not from the start) and so having to retrofit the code to allow for this was, shall we say, a fun experience - if your idea of fun is breaking th...

Free Game: Batty Junior - Christmas Special Edition
2007-12-11 20:40:00
As it's going to be a while before Batty Junior is finished (another couple of months at the current rate of progress I'd guess) but the game is at a reasonable stage I've decided to have a bit of fun with the code so far and release a special Christmas themed mini-game - Batty Christmas!Downloads for Linux and Windows (OpenGL and DirectX binaries) are available from the front page at http://dans-remakes.sytes.net.The game will be removed after Christmas, so if you fancy a bit of seasonal fun you'd better get your skates on!
More About: Free , Game , Special , Special Edition

Video of Chaos Caverns and RetroVaders
2007-12-04 23:06:00
Thanks to the magic of the freeware CamStudio I've put together some demo footage of my other games, RetroVaders and Chaos Cave rns.First up - Chaos Caverns.Followed by RetroVaders.More later.
More About: Video

Batty Junior - Video Preview
2007-12-04 08:15:00
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I wonder what a video is worth?This is a short clip from the first level. The game itself is far from finished, but this gives a general idea of the current state of play.(Remember kids - games seen on YouTube may appear crapper than they actually are)
More About: Video , Preview , Video Preview , Junior

A Very Monty Christmas!
2007-12-02 20:38:00
Christmas has come early for us UK retro fans with the release of Trevor (Smila) Storey and Scottige's homage to Mont y Mole - Monty Christmas!For those of you unfamiliar with Monty Mole, he was the star of a handful of games in the late 80s (Wanted: Monty Mole, Monty On The Run, Aufwiedersehn Monty and Impossamole).He also featured in a mini-game on Your Sinclair magazine called Moley Christmas. History has repeated itself with this Retro Gamer magazine instigated game. The plot (if you need one) is that Sam Stoat has stolen the pages of the Christmas issue of Retro Gamer, and you have to get them back.The game itself is a typical 80s platform game - fast, unforgiving, difficult and fun, with graphics and music that would have been at home on a C64. There are plenty of tricky jumps to be made, items to collect and surreal baddies to avoid.To make the game easier there are save points every 20 pages (press L on the menu screen to reload the last save point). So far I can only ge...
More About: Christmas

Futurama Returns!
2007-11-28 00:07:00
Yes folks, Futurama is back, and it's about time!I've got to admit that I've always preferred Futurama to The Simpsons, and so I have been eagerly looking forward to the straight-to-dvd release of "Bender's Big Score". Was it worth it?In a word YES! If this first one is anything to judge by then Futurama is coming back stronger than ever. All the old gang are here, the animation is better than ever, the music is spot on, the script is as good, if not better, than the earlier episodes.I don't want to give too much of the story away - but I will say that this is a time travel story done as only Futurama can do it.There is a quite a bit of "fan service" this time round (the trip to the nudist planet springs to mind), and the humour is certainly more adult than before, as well as a few digs at other cartoon series - so far I've spotted references to South Park (Cartman's head in the head museum) and Family Guy (the Family Guy calendar - Twelve laughs a year).Hopefully the next...

Blogrush update
2007-11-27 12:06:00
Well, a while has passed since my last post on BlogRush. So what has changed? Quite a lot actually. The new BlogRush dashboard is active, some traffic has come my way (although it is still more of a BlogTrickle than a BlogRush), so really I think I'll keep it running as part of my site.The new dashboard is actually rather nice, and gives plenty of graphs and charts for any statistics freaks that may be reading.So overall as a free service any additional traffic is a Good Thing, just don't expect to gain hundreds (or even dozens) of additional readers.
More About: Update

The Name Game
2007-11-26 13:38:00
Jeff Minter, The Man, The Myth, The Yak. A true legend in the annals of games programming. As far as the games industry in the UK goes, Jeff was there before there was an industry. He is unique in that he has remained untouched by the big business atitude to modern software and still writes games tailored to what he feels a game should be, rather than aiming for market share. So the following livejournal post about the sales of his latest game on XBox Live Arcade came as a bit of a surprise. "not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga.We'll shut up trying to do anything new then.Sorry for even trying." - Jeff Mint...
More About: Game

Batty Junior - Status Update
2007-11-20 12:28:00
Has it really been a week since the last post? My word doesn't time fly when you're having fun?So how is Batty Junior coming along I pretend to hear you ask?Not bad is the answer. Slow progress, but not bad.As you can see, the game is starting to come together. There is still a lot of work to do, but some important milestones have been reached.Lives work (so you can loose).Level transitions work.Scoring (and the high score) works.The first few bonus items are working including "bonus lives", "slow mode" and "smash ball".So what's next? In order of priority:Finishing off the bonus items.Adding the extra game features (such as indestructable walls, regenerating walls, gravity changer).Adding new features (not telling what though)Adding the enemies.Completing the levels.So as you can see there is plenty to do. I'll be releasing a "beta" release at some point when things are further along.
More About: Update , Status

gOS (Green OS, not Google OS)
2007-11-14 12:06:00
A couple of weeks ago Everex released a low cost (sub $200) PC running on Linux. The PCs were on sale at Walmart. Note the past tense here. They sold out within days.The PCs themselves aren't that highly powered (1.5GHz processor, 80GB hard drive, 512 meg memory) but are certainly more than up to daily word processing and web browsing tasks. The big news was the choice of Linux distro - gOS.Despite rumours this isn't Google OS - it's Green OS, but unofficially it contains so much integrated Google stuff that it is hard to see it as anything other than Google OS.Although the PCs are sold out at the moment, developer boards are available which all come with a DVD version of gOS. This includes licensed versions of all codecs needed for MP3 playback, DVD playback and some other stuff too.gOS is available for download from http://www.thinkgos.com/ as a single live / install CD.So what is gOS like? First impressions are very nice. The desktop runs on Enlightenment. It looks rem...

Arcadia Test 3 released for MacOS X
2007-11-13 20:13:00
Pretty much every programmer has a guilty little secret, a game that was abandoned before its time, never to be completed.This is the story of mine.Many moons ago (back in 2002 in fact) I started work on my first games remake - which was of Imagine Software's Arcadia , a shoot-em-up from 1982. The game code (and pre-rendered 3d graphics) went quite well - up to the point where Windows 98 ate my hard disk and I learned an important lesson about the need to take regular backups.In many ways this incident was a turning point for me, as this was what finally persuaded me to try going cold-turkey on Windows and run Linux full time. Initially I wanted to run Linux exclusively for a couple of months to see how it fared compared to Windows.I never went back.The only casualty of this switch was Arcadia. The source code that I found was out-dated, the pre-rendered graphics of the later levels was gone, and worst of all Blitz (which I was using to write the game in) didn't run on Linux. B...
More About: Released , Test

Dan at Work (the Sunday shift)
2007-11-11 21:29:00
Sunday is not my favourite of days to be at work, but here I am.The problem (for me) with Sundays is that is a fairly quiet day, but technical support can still be required. I've had a few support calls tonight (nothing too taxing though) and have managed to move on with my testing of some .MSI packages ready for rolling out to around 300 users.I've been playing with the idea of product updates via Active Directory GPOs and have found that they work fairly well. Getting some of the products as MSI packages isn't as easy as it might be, but there are some products available to help convert / create packages.This should make our security and product updates much easier. I didn't have the opportunity to look at this the last time we had an emergency update which when we upgraded to IE7. This came about when our proxy servers were updated and didn't work with IE6 and lower. That experience proved to me once and for all that trying to update all our users manually is too much w...
More About: Work , Sunday , Shift

RetroVaders 1.30 and Chaos Caverns 1.20 for MacOS X
2007-11-11 21:22:00
I've finally managed to get my hands on a Mac to get the MacOS port of RetroVaders updated. This brings the MacOS version up to date with the Linux / Windows releases.I've also created an up-to-date version of Chaos Cave rns for MacOS as well.Both of these will be appearing on Dan's Remakes sometime in the next 24 hours.I'd also spotted a small bug in the RetroVaders screenshot code, which I've fixed. I'll be recompiling the Linux and Windows versions of RetroVaders to incorporate the fix (the version number will stay the same though). All being even I'll get that done tomorrow as well.

BBC iPlayer
2007-11-06 11:04:00
Here's a slice of personal opinion for you - DRM is what you use when you want to treat your customers like thieves.The BBC has managed to do this with their launch of the iPlayer. Now for those of us in the UK the iPlayer is a pretty nice app to allow you to download BBC content to watch on your PC (content that your TV license fee has paid for by the way) - sort of a catch-up service.The problem is that thanks to the BBC using Microsoft's DRM for the video they have effectively ruled out Linux users from using the service. Yes, there will be a web based service (using Adobe Flash presumably) "before Christmas" but as far as high resolution video goes - forget it. For now at least.The BBC's head of technology has this to say: "We're totally committed to universality, to getting the service out to everyone, and to platform neutrality." And how, exactly does this fit with using a restricted codec? Answer: it doesn't.Part of the BBC's justification for this has been the num...